An abundance of technological innovations continue to be developed for the purpose of enhancing ability and interest in reading. Most of these innovations, however, are comprehensive software reading programs that restrict reading choices to the texts chosen by the reading program software developers. While tools exist to animate text within a presentation, (e.g. a presentation prepared and displayed using, for instance, Microsoft's POWERPOINT™ slide show presentation program), such programs require users to choose words and apply animation to each word individually. With current technology, a user with advanced technical skills would need to perform seventeen specialized steps per word to create a presentation.
Similarly, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is currently available and provides sequential, central placement of text, which is captured in and offered in devices or through source code available on the Internet. The RSVP process typically presents an entire text one word at a time in the same central place on a screen, in a continuous presentation of visual items, which is around 10 items per second.
Many learning institutions require students or users to use tablets (e.g., Apple based or Android based tablets) for testing, reading material, notes, lessons, etc. Tools exist to provide customizable reading comprehension enhancement for specific texts (e.g. ACTIVE TEXTBOOK™ commercially available from Evident Point), for use in conjunction with such tablets or desktop computers made available to the students, as would be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art. Reading material (e.g., text based reading material in a digital format) may include a plurality of key words and phrases that can be classified into levels (e.g., grades) based on an ability of the user. However, determining which phrases and/or words within the reading material are appropriate for a particular level of user may be difficult to determine. Furthermore, being able to point out the important words or phrases to the user may be difficult and time consuming for the teacher, tutor, mentor, trainer, guide or instructor. Therefore, it is desired to have a machine that can determine appropriate words and/or phrases for a user to emphasize and to display those appropriate words and/or phrases to the user.
Thus, currently available technology such as these described hereinabove do not provide an optimized learning experience, at least because it does not animate words specifically intended to enhance comprehension or help readers construct meaning and interpretation. The concepts presented herein overcome the shortcomings of currently available technology and provides visually interesting display of selected text and additional cognitive scaffolding tools for reading comprehension.
Various features, aspects, and advantages of the embodiments will become more apparent from the following detailed description, along with the accompanying figures in which like numerals represent like components throughout the figures and text. The various described features are not necessarily drawn to scale, but are drawn to emphasize specific features relevant to some embodiments.